1. Technical Field
The invention relates generally to rebasing a software application, and more specifically, to a solution for remapping a component/module of an application from an internal proprietary database to a new database.
2. Related Art
The trend in recent years has been for data to be shared by many software applications. As a result, data is now frequently stored in databases that use an “open” standard to perform operations on the data. An open standard is a publicly known way of storing and/or accessing data. The use of an open standard allows several applications to both implement functions and access data stored using the open standard. A commonly used open standard for interacting with a database is the Structured Query Language (SQL).
Unfortunately, many popular software applications were implemented using proprietary systems for storing and accessing data. In light of the recent trend, consumers are increasingly expecting that these applications also be able to share data with other applications. Additionally, administrators seek to reduce costs by having fewer backend systems that require administration, backup, etc. However, these applications are frequently tightly coupled to the proprietary data storage systems. Further, it is often not economical and/or desirable to rewrite these applications in their entirety. As a result, there is a need to “rebase” these applications from the proprietary data storage system to an open data storage system. Rebasing keeps the application the same from a user's perspective, while changing the underlying data storage system. When an application is tightly coupled to the proprietary data storage scheme, rebasing the application can be difficult. Because of this, current rebasing operations frequently result in new incompatibilities and software glitches, high costs, and may result in an inability to exploit useful features of the open data storage system.
As a result, a need exists for a solution for economically and reliably rebasing an application. In particular, a need exists for a method, system, and program product that simplify the rebasing operation and reduce the changes that are required to rebase the application.